Tile-based rendering allows overdraws of occluded content on depth/color buffers to be contained on chip without consuming bandwidth to main memory. Further, there are opportunities to save memory bandwidth by completely discarding the unused streams at the end of tile rendering.
The benefits of color data discard, under tile-based rendering, depend on the use case. For a pixel local storage use case, two or more render passes may be used, where the first pass is a geometry-buffer pass that resolves depth and renders to intermediate render targets (RT). Subsequent render pass(es) may consume these intermediate render targets as texture and shade final colors per pixel. All of these passes are collapsed to rendering to a single tile. This allows for discarding intermediate RTs at the end of the pass. For a multi-sampled anti-aliasing (MSAA) resolve use case, the results are similar to the pixel local storage use case. After rendering to MSAA, MSAA resolve can be performed on that tile in the same render sequence per tile. This allows for intermediate renter targets to be discarded.